


Take You Far Away [From Trouble My Love]

by Nerissa



Category: Girl Meets World
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, F/F, Road Trips, Snowed In, technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-22 14:15:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9611030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerissa/pseuds/Nerissa
Summary: Their drive upstate ends with a flat tire, but what's a little walk in a blizzard when you've got your girlfriend by your side?It'scold, that's what it is. It's really freakin' cold.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SaraJaye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaraJaye/gifts).



“Well that’s the tire gone.”

“Gone?” Riley jerked upright in the passenger seat, panic taking hold faster from a half-sleep than it would have if she’d been fully awake. “Gone where? Where did it go? Maya?”

She turned a suspicious stare on her girlfriend, who was tapping the steering wheel of the car. It wasn’t a nervous tapping, more the kind of irritated tap you’d give when you saw your plans tangle up like unravelled string, and weren’t looking forward to the unknotting of them. The car engine purred quietly in the late afternoon twilight, smugly secure in the satisfaction of doing _its_ job properly, no matter what deficiencies were cropping up elsewhere.

“Maya, what did you do with the tire?”

Maya’s eyebrows rose in polite disbelief.

“I did _nothing_. The tire gave up on its own. I mean I dunno, maybe it had a little outside encouragement; this road is really bad. Now let’s get out there and fix it before we’re buried under this snow.”

“Snow?” Riley rubbed the last of almost-sleep from her eyes and took in the sight of the cold, swirling white whipping into a vortex around them. “Aww. It’s so pretty up here.”

“It’ll be prettier when we’re looking out at all of it from the inside of the cabin,” Maya opined, and cut the engine. “Right now it’s just—oh  _wow_.” She opened the door and flinched back as the wind slapped her face. “Cold.”

Riley nipped out her door as well and they reunited beside the flat tire. Maya frowned at the tire. Riley beamed at Maya.

“This is fun, though, right?” She rocked back and forth in her enjoyment of the situation. Or maybe that was the wind. “It’s an adventure! A real old-timey type. We’re like the pioneers that have gone before us, two intrepid gals just rolling along highway . . . um . . . what highway is this?”

“It’s not.” Maya poked one gloved finger through a hole in the side of the tire. “It’s barely a track. A _dirt_ track. Except by dirt I mean mostly rocks, and . . . I think a rock is what did this to us.”

“Well, let’s fix it,” Riley decided, clapping her mittened hands together. “Because I don’t think there’s a rule we can’t finish our adventure somewhere warmer.”

Maya was only too willing to drag the car jack out of the trunk, but their plans hit a snag when it proved there was no tire to drag after it.

“Um, Riles?” she knelt to peek under the back bumper, just to make sure. “I don’t think we have a spare.”

“No spare?” Riley, happily spinning the crank of the jack with one finger, paused mid-spin to squint at Maya through the blowing snow. “Where did it go? Maya, what did you do with the spare?”

“Riles,” Maya looked genuinely torn between laughter and disbelief, “I didn’t do anything with it! How could I? This isn’t even my car.”

“It’s not?” Riley dropped the jack like it had burned her, and took a speedy step back, hands tucked behind her. “Whose car—oh Maya,” in real anguish, “you didn’t steal it, did you? Am I an accomplice? Am I a carjacker now? Are we gonna spend the night in the hoosegow when the sheriff runs us to ground? They always run ‘em to ground, Maya, you know they do.”

She looked back and forth as if she expected a Sheriff to pop out from behind a snowbank, cuffs in hand. When none did, she considered their options.

“Maybe we can run away to Canada. Though then there’s the Mounties, and I am pretty sure they’re the ones who always get their man. But it might be okay, neither of us are men, are we? So that’s probably the best thing. We’ll do that. Now,” she turned a tight, panicked circle, “which way is Canada? We should really try to get there before dark.”

Maya’s disbelief had given way to laughter about ten panicked sentences earlier. She was still smiling when she caught Riley’s shoulders firmly to stop her spinning.

“We’re not running away to Canada. We’re going to Shawn—to Dad’s cabin. Just like we planned.”

“But—this car is stolen! It’s _hot_! They’ll track us down in no time. First rule of going on the run is no contact with your old life. You stay away from family, Maya; I know it’s rough, but if you reach out that’s how they get you!”

“Someday,” Maya said, “I’m gonna ask where you’re getting all this, and then we’ll maybe talk about if it’s something you should limit your intake of. Because you seem pretty ready to go on the run with me, and that’s . . . actually it’s pretty adorable.” She kissed the tip of Riley’s nose, to show she meant it. “But the car’s not stolen. It’s a rental.”

Riley blinked. She peeked sideways at the car with its blown rear tire.

“A rental?”

“Yes. Dad told me to rent a car; he said it would give us more flexibility up here than taking the train. Riley, I swear I told you all of this already. Don’t you remember? When we were on our way out of the city.”

“Oh,” Riley frowned, scraping around in search of that conversation. “That was probably when I was counting streetlights. Every tenth one, you’re supposed to make a wish.”

“Don’t suppose you thought to wish for a spare tire to be stashed under a tree for us, did you?”

Riley shook her head, sincerely regretful that she had not.

“Are we very far from the cabin? Could we just walk?”

“I think we’ll have to. Roadside assistance probably wouldn’t get here any faster than we could get there. Might as well call them from somewhere warm.”

“All right,” Riley snugged her fuzzy hat down tighter over her ears, and tugged her scarf up to cover the lower half of her face. She squinted at Maya in steely determination, the effect only marginally spoiled by the layers of fluffy blue and cream wool that framed her stare.

“We are very brave pioneers and we are trekking north through the wilderness to the promised land.”

“The cabin,” Maya corrected, tugging her hood up against the wind. She pulled both of their bags from the backseat, helping Riley wedge the straps of the backpack over her winter coat before shouldering her own.

“But you _promised_ to take me there,” Riley reasoned, twitching the backpack into a more comfortable position, “and it’s a place. A place on _land_. So it still counts.”

“Right,” said Maya. “Promised land it is.” She wrapped her glove around Riley’s mitt, taking more strength than she’d have cared to admit from the shape of her girlfriend’s fingers through the soft woolen knit. “Let’s go.”

While it was true they weren’t actually that far from the cabin, both girls were rapidly forced to acknowledge that even things which are close by feel much farther away when covering the distance between you and them also involves trekking over a wind-scraped rocky dirt road, through snowdrifts, against the cold press of the wind and into the rapid dark of a late winter evening.

“I don’t know if I can go on,” Riley gasped. “The wind . . . the snow . . . it’s been _miles_.”

Maya looked back at the snow-dusted form of their rental car.

“Riles, it’s been three hundred yards, max.”

“Oh.” Riley shook off some of her dramatic despair, along with a healthy coating of snow. “Well, we’re just lucky to have made it this far.”

“It really isn’t so bad,” Maya consoled her. “We’ve just got this last hill, then it all levels out until we reach the driveway. The wind shouldn’t even be this bad once we get in there; the trees will block it.”

“I guess not every adventure’s going to be comfortable,” Riley sighed. Maya tucked her arm around the taller girl’s waist just below her backpack, partly for comfort, partly for balance as they continued their trek. “The pioneers probably weren’t too comfortable either.”

“I don’t know if anybody was comfortable back then,” Maya reflected. “Unless they were the really rich people.” She tugged Riley around a waist-high drift, electing instead to lead them through one that was only knee-height. “And they only got to be comfortable because everybody else wasn’t.”

“Yee-eeah,” Riley dragged out the word, turning this thought over. “But they probably didn’t have a lot of adventures either. So life wasn’t so great for them either, really, was it?”

“What,” Maya laughed, pulling Riley through the next drift, then pausing to dust off her snow-caked jeans, “you’re enjoying this?”

Riley blinked at Maya from between the brim of her tugged-down hat and the upper, frost-crusted lip of her tugged-up scarf.

“Of course I am, silly. I’m with you.”

And Maya found, due to a combination of wind stealing her breath and something warm and sweet making its nest in the upper part of her ribcage, there was nothing she could say to that.

 

* * *

 

The wind did abate once they reached the upper curve of the hill, just as Maya had predicted (“my girlfriend is an _outdoorsman_!” Riley caroled proudly to the trees. The trees bobbed and bowed in polite affirmation, and Maya had to laugh before saying no, she’d just spent enough time up here with her parents to know how some of it worked). The drifts were much smaller without wind to form them, and snow fell more softly and purposefully, less desperately, from above. Riley widened the gap between her hat and scarf. Maya pushed her hood back a little, and although she no longer needed her grip on Riley’s waist for balance, she kept it for other reasons.

“I’m glad you suggested we come up here,” she admitted. Riley, her tongue extended above her scarf to catch a snowflake, didn’t answer. Maya watched her catch that snowflake, then another, and smiled.

“It’s even gonna be worth the wet boots.”

“Are your boots wet?” Riley craned her neck, as though she’d be able to tell just by looking. “How can you tell? I can’t feel my feet at all anymore.”

“Well, that’ll change soon enough. We just need to start down that part of the hill and the driveway will be on the left. Twenty minutes, tops.”

“That’s a good size for an adventure,” Riley decided. “Like the bunny slope of adventures. Just enough to get your feet wet. If you can still feel them.”

“I can. They’re wet.”

“Adventures sometimes mean wet feet,” Riley decided.

“My girlfriend is an adventurer,” Maya said, with some satisfaction. The trees rattled approvingly.

Without the wind to fight against, they set a steadier pace. It wasn’t always possible to hang onto each other when the road decided to do something especially complicated, frozen tracks that channelled rainwater in the summer now conspiring to grab at boot heels and turn the ankles of the unwary, but they still managed to hold hands for most of the trip.

The wind found them again as they started down the other side of the hill, but it wasn’t more than another three hundred yards before the painted wooden sign hanging from a tree at the end of the long drive came into view, the bright white letters gleaming their welcome in the deepening grey of a post-sunset sky.

“Hunter!” Riley burbled into her scarf. “Look at that, Maya. Isn’t it nice when the trees know your name?”

Maya smiled.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “It kinda is.”

The driveway was even more heavily wooded than the road at the top of the hill. Some parts were bare of snow entirely, and the girls were careful to pick a path that covered as much of the bare ground as they could. The cabin itself, nestled against the frozen lake at the foot of the drive, was a warm and friendly promise, even without any lights on or smoke curling from the chimney.

“The promised land,” Riley sighed rapturously. “Oh it’s even better than I remember it.”

Maya produced a key and set to reasoning with the frozen lock. Riley waited patiently beside her and scanned the area around them.

“Hi Stevie,” she waved at the squirrel scolding from an upper branch. “We’re here for the weekend. Say hi to the family!”

Maya got the door open before Stevie could finish his polysyllabic reply.

Even without a fire, the cabin was warmer than the world around it. A central heating system kept firing at a low temperature went a long way toward making it feel even warmer than it actually was, and Maya was quick to find the thermostat, cranking it up to something much more ambitious. After they peeled off the snowiest parts of their clothing and hung it to dry, Riley called for roadside assistance and began relating the dramatic tale of their disaster while Maya laid a fire and set a match to the edge of crumpled newsprint.

“—but we’re _here_ and we’re _safe_ and I think we’re probably going to have a feast around the fire,” Riley wound up. “Because we’re pioneers. So all we need is somebody to fix the tire, and everything will be _perfect_.”

Maya turned from watching the flames spread and catch to smile at the earnest conclusion of Riley’s narrative.

“Are they sending somebody?” she wondered. Riley covered the mouthpiece.

“Oh not yet, that was just directory assistance. They’re connecting me now.”

So Riley got to tell her story all over again while Maya rummaged through cupboards and came up with enough cans and packets to mix into something promising on the stove. By the time Riley secured a promise of a changed tire in the morning, pots were bubbling and something smelled delicious.

“If we’re pioneers,” Maya said apologetically, “I know we should cook it on the fire. But it’s spaghetti, so . . .”

Riley wrapped her arms around Maya’s waist and rested her chin on her shoulder.

“It’s perfect.”

“There were baked beans,” Maya admitted, even more apologetic, “which would have been pioneer-y, I know, but—”

“But you think eating baked beans is like eating June bugs,” Riley finished. “And _thank_ you for that, cause now every time I eat them, I remember you saying it. But really,” she nuzzled her cheek a little closer to Maya’s, “this is perfect.”

Spaghetti eaten by an open fire, it turned out, was every bit as delicious and pioneer-y as spaghetti actually cooked over it. And snuggling down under a blanket on a couch turned around to the face the fire might not have been pioneer-y, but with the snow falling outside and the fire crackling in front of them, neither of the would-be pioneers minded the lack of authenticity in the least.

“D’you suppose Stevie’s family is done their supper by now?” Riley wondered. She settled her head on Maya’s shoulder, which had taken an impressive amount of doubling-up and scrunching-down on the couch for her to reach.

“Prob’ly.” Maya draped an arm around Riley, trailing her fingers through a tangle of dark frizzy curls created by a since-dried snow layer. “All from little different nooks and . . . wherever they hid it, I guess.”

“Mmm. I think I’d make a good squirrel,” Riley decided. “I like finding things.”

“You’d make the best whatever-you-wanted-to-be,” Maya promised.

“Yeah?”

“Sure. I mean, Riles, you were gonna take us on the run to _Canada_ when you thought I stole a car.”

“Oh yeah,” Riley considered the plan, abandoned as quickly as it had formed. “So I could be a travel agent too.”

“Or a mobster.”

“Yeah,” Riley grinned. “A hoodlum. A real troublemaker, that’s me. A—a hardboiled egg.”

“Um. Sure,” Maya laughed. “A hardboiled egg.” She pressed a kiss to Riley’s cheek, then to the corner of her mouth. “My hardboiled egg.”

Thrilled at the prospect of two whole new career paths unfurling before her, Riley pulled the blanket up and snuggled in closer.

“But tonight,” she said, “we’re still pioneers. The _good_ kind, though. The adventuring kind that don’t hurt people. Not the killing everyone and dying of dysentery kind.”

“Glad you clarified. I’d have wondered, otherwise.”

Riley’s fingers tangled in the fringe on the blanket that covered them both. The fire cast a comforting warmth over the couch, and after a trek through the snow, bunny-slope of an adventure or not, her eyelids drooped.

“If you weren’t a pioneer tonight, Maya,” she said sleepily, “what would you be?”

Maya, also drowsy in the fireglow, managed a shrug.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“An adventurer?” Riley suggested. She was more horizontal than upright by now, Maya’s lap her pillow. “A—an outdoorsman.”

Maya laughed.

“Maybe. Does it matter?”

Riley didn’t persist, exactly, but she didn’t let up.

“Kind of. A little. Whatever it is, though . . . something good?”

Maya smiled.

“Yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely something good; it always is.”

She smoothed her palm over Riley’s hair, watching her fall asleep.

“Long as I’m with you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for your prompts! I liked so many of them that I ended up mixing a few together; I hope you enjoyed the result.
> 
> Title is a line from Tom Petty's _Kings Highway_. It just seemed to fit these two.


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